By David Cortesi

SUMMER 2001 | KAREN ARMSTRONG'S "BUDDHA (Penguin Putnam Inc., 2001) is a brief, sympathetic account of the life of the Buddha in the context of his time. Armstrong is well known as a historian of religion, and in this book shows again that she can research widely, write well, and convey religious concepts with sympathy and understanding.

However, "Buddha" is marred by brevity and by a distanced, clinical treatment of the Buddha's dhamma that makes it seem little more than an antique, cultural artifact, not a relevant way of life.

This book is part of the Penguin "Lives" series, and I presume that the series format accounts for some of the shortcomings of this book, shortcomings which include:

• Its brief length: fewer than 200 rather small pages, priced at about 10 cents per page.
• Its lack of any illustrations: failing to use any of the rich resources of Buddhist art.
• Its rather abrupt end with the Buddha's death: not even a brief epilogue to recount how one teacher's words grew into a worldwide religion.
• The absence of a guide to the pronunciation of the many Pali terms used throughout.
• The omission of an index.

These lacks show the book is not intended as a definitive biography or reference work; nor it is it intended to have theological depth that could challenge or educate a well-read Buddhist. This is strictly a brief, popular "life" intended to give a broad picture of the Buddha's career to a curious non-Buddhist reader or to an undergraduate or high-school student.

Within the scope of this limited goal Armstrong has done a reasonably good job. Certainly it could not have been easy to shape a conventional, biographical tale from the Pali canon and other Buddhist scriptures. Armstrong stresses that an integral part of the Buddha's teaching was the unimportance of the ego, and for that reason the Buddha's personal attributes disappeared, both from his teachings and from his disciple's accounts. Little is left but the suttas themselves and some highly-colored legends surrounding the key moments of the Buddha's life.

ARMSTRONG IS PARTICULARY GOOD at recounting these legends and drawing out their inner meanings. She tells a legend sympathetically and then shows how it make clear sense, not as literal history but as a statement of belief in the context of its time, or as an archetypal portrait of the human condition. For one small example, she notes how Mara, Lord of Illusion, "represents ... all the unconscious elements within
the psyche which fight against our liberation."

Armstrong also explains many parts of the Buddha-dhamma clearly and sympathetically. However, there are key concepts (anicca, anatta, and dependent origination) that she does not seem to really grasp in any depth, or at least she does not attempt to explain them as ideas to the reader, nor does she give them their due importance.

Worse, whenever discussing the dhamma she seems to handle it with metaphorical tongs, like an interesting specimen -- not as if it were a living tradition the reader might enter. This is a subtle matter of tone, of voice and syntax. Part of the impression comes from her very consistent use of the perfect tense when describing the dhamma. For example, she writes "The purpose of both mindfulness and the immeasurables was to neutralize the power of that egotism that limits human potential." In this and many similar sentences, the use of the perfect ("was") or the conditional ("would") leaves the unstated sense that the dhamma existed only long ago among foreign people. There is no hint whatever that (for example) mindfulness is used for precisely the same purpose by millions of people (including tens of thousands of Americans) today.

The effect of this diction is to transmit the unspoken message that Armstrong herself has not entered into the Dhamma, and wouldn't care to recommend it to her reader, either. If you think of yourself as being in some degree Buddhist, you may find this consistent attitude of faint praise makes you uncomfortable.

PAGE 2 | Flunking out at meditation

	Page One | Editor's Notes | Buddhascope | Buddamerica | Dharmatalk | Foundobjects | GuestColumn | Meditation | Poetry | Quotes | ReadingRoom | SiteIndex | Contact Us | Subscribe